Dr KEVIN BONHAM
One of the strangest by-elections in Tasmanian political history has turned out to be remarkably lopsided. Don’t believe the usual ritual about a nervous wait for preferences or opponents in denial hoping for a close result. Given that the Liberals’ Vanessa Goodwin polled 38.52% of the primaries (as of the Sunday recheck) to her nearest rival’s 12.76%, any candidate wishing to beat Goodwin would need to get at least 3.25 preferences for every preference Goodwin got from the remaining candidates. Considering that the candidate currently in second (Heatley) could well be overtaken if the cutup goes all the way to two candidates, the ratio is probably higher than that, and it becomes even higher still when one considers that in an election with eight candidates where only voting to three is required, a small percentage of papers are going to exhaust.
Preference flows of around that strength are sometimes seen between certain parties (eg Green to Labor) in federal elections that allow how to vote cards and require numbering of all squares. In an election in which preferences would need to come from many different mostly “independent” candidates, in which most candidates were not of any printed party, in which how to vote cards are banned and in which voters are allowed to stop at 3, a 3.25 to 1 preference flow against Vanessa Goodwin is impossible. A good comparison is the 2007 cutup, in which anti-Labor votes were obviously pooling with Richard James but the ratio at which he was closing on Ritchie was still only 1.5 to 1. A similar thing might happen with anti-Liberal votes this time. It will take at least three exclusions for the winner to cross the line, but much more likely four or five. It’s not at all likely to take six.
Not only was the result clearly decided based on the primaries but experienced psephologists were already flirting with calling it after the first three lots of figures went up (mobile, some of the pre-polls, Mornington) and pretty much unanimous in declaring the contest over after the fourth lot of figures (Wentworth Street) hit the screen. So what can be drawn from this lopsided outcome?
Firstly, Vanessa Goodwin polled well. Some may say that 38.5% against a bunch of Independents and a Green is nothing special, but a good comparison point is Allison Ritchie’s second win in 2007. Both Ritchie and Goodwin faced a field including Richard James, John Peers and one endorsed Green. Additionally Ritchie faced Marti Zucco and David Jackson while Goodwin faced Honey Bacon, James Crotty, Peter Cooper and Sharon Soo. Disregarding Jackson and Soo (who both polled nothing worth speaking of), it is clear that Goodwin faced a larger and tougher field than Ritchie did. Furthermore, the Greens campaigned more strongly in this by-election than in 2007.
Despite these differences in the field, Ritchie’s primary vote in 2007 was only 4.3 points higher than Goodwin’s in 2009. This was despite Ritchie having the advantage of incumbency, and despite Pembroke favouring Labor over Liberal in every recent State and Federal election (2004 federal by 10.1 points, 2006 state by 15.9 points, 2007 federal amid severe Labor candidate woes by 2.8 points). Ritchie’s performance in retaining her seat in 2007 as a Labor incumbent was at worst mediocre so Vanessa Goodwin’s primary vote in 2009 as a Liberal is clearly very good.
There have already been some predictable attempts (eg Honey Bacon on ABC News, Sunday) to write off Goodwin’s result as just getting the usual Liberal vote. Not only did Goodwin actually beat the modest 2006 state Liberal vote by five points, but if just getting the usual Liberal vote in this field is no big deal then why did Allison Ritchie not get near the usual Pembroke Labor vote in a similar but slightly weaker field in 2007, and why did Michael Aird not even get within double figures of the usual Derwent Labor vote in a field of just three candidates earlier this year? Anyone seeking to write this result off cannot have it both ways. If Vanessa Goodwin’s performance was really only so-so then those recent Labor performances must have been truly abysmal.
The result, however, was more defined not so much by Goodwin doing well but by the two “Labor-ish” candidates, James Crotty and Honey Bacon, doing poorly. I am not at all surprised that Crotty flopped – given his lack of profile in the electorate and his risky politics I repeatedly flagged that he might not be able to get over the Greens, and that is exactly what occurred. I am quite surprised by the sheer extent to which Honey Bacon also failed and did so without Crotty picking up any of the slack. The conspicuous defects of the Honey Bacon campaign were noted in part 2 of campaign preview but given the way Tasmanians often vote on recognition for the names they know and trust, it was easy to suspect that
The vote for the Greens’ Wendy Heatley was fractionally down on that achieved by the party in 2007. Her vote itself was very much as we predicted, and a reasonable result for the party given that the field was significantly larger in 2007 and that the effects of a stronger campaign were more or less cancelled out by the majority of candidates adopting at least Green-ish positions on Ralphs Bay among other issues. The unexpected bonus for the Greens is that the remaining cards have collapsed in such a way as to give them second place on primaries, which is quite a handy publicity boost for them even if they got it by default. I, for one, thought third on primaries was the best that they could realistically hope for. Whether Heatley is still second when Vanessa Goodwin crosses the line remains to be seen.
The three Clarence councillors performed better than we expected (polling a combined 28.4% of the vote compared to our estimate of around 20). It is clear that many voters who habitually vote Labor at state and federal elections parked their vote with these independent local councillors rather than with the independent widow of the former Labor Premier, or with the critical-of-his-own-party “Independent Labor” candidate Crotty. But it is too simplistic to assume (as many will doubtless do) that the voters must be running a mile from anyone carrying the slightest whiff of the present Labor government. Rather, it may well be the case that many Labor voters saw both Crotty and Bacon as so critical of the current state of Labor to not even be real Labor candidates. All we know is that the pleas of both these candidates to elect a critical candidate with sympathetic values to fix up Labor’s governance/personnel mess fell on deaf ears, but is this because former diehard Labor voters would rather have the mess fixed up by someone completely outside the tent? Or is it because they are still Labor diehards and believe the “mess” is no big deal and no reason to vote for “Labor-ish” candidates who are critical to the point of disloyalty? One wonders indeed – as “genuine pembroke bloke” did in comments herehere – who did Lara Giddings vote for?
If there had been at least a tokenly “independent” Labor candidate in the field (a la Kathryn Hay in Windermere) it would have been possible to draw strong conclusions about the state of Labor’s stocks in this electorate from their performance. Because there was not, it is not: except that Vanessa Goodwin clearly picked up at least five percent from somewhere, and it wasn’t from the Greens. The notional swing to the Liberals is probably much more than those five points too, since those voting for Cooper, Peers and James would include quite a few voters who vote for local Independents when they get the chance, but prefer the Libs to Greens and Labor in the Lower House. Some of these hidden Liberal votes will be revealed as the preferences of Cooper and probably Peers are distributed during the cutup, and we may then get a real idea of just how many 2006 Labor voters preferred Vanessa Goodwin to either of the remotely Labor-connected candidates in this Pembroke poll.
As usual the booth-by-booth voting patterns may reveal some useful things. For Cooper, Peers and the Greens it is easy to simply compare results with the 2007 Pembroke results (ignoring Mornington which wasn’t in the electorate). For both major parties I have used the 2006 state results (and also looked at 2007 federal) to assess which booths are historically good Labor booths and which are more friendly to the Liberals.
There is no useful pattern in the Green vote. Their best booths relative to 2007 included booths where they had done well in 2007 (Wentworth St, Bellerive, Geilston Bay) and a booth where they will always poll badly (Risdon Vale). Their worst booths relative to 2007 included their best two booths from 2007 (Montague Bay and Lindisfarne) but also one of their worst (Bligh). They were neither up more than two points nor down more than three in any booth.
Goodwin’s vote exceeded the 2006 state Liberal vote in every booth except the strongly Labor booth of Bligh. At this booth, it was fractionally lower and John Peers, who lives in an adjacent suburb, topped the booth by two votes (the only booth not topped by Goodwin). The biggest improvement was in Tranmere (+10 points), but that had already firmed as a Liberal booth in the 2007 federal election. Goodwin also did well relative to 2006 in the Labor booths of Mornington (+7.7, something to do with the roundabout?) and Risdon Vale (+5.2). Aside from Bligh the least improved booths were Bellerive (+1.4), which is quite a strong booth for Liberals, and Loatta Road (+2), which is middling by Pembroke standards. So again, no clear geographic pattern.
Almost all the remaining six candidates (James is the exception) show the same pattern of generally getting their highest votes in the traditional Labor booths of Bligh, Mornington, Risdon Vale, Warrane and performing less well in the traditionally less Labor-leaning booths of Bellerive, Howrah, Lindisfarne, Montagu Bay and Tranmere. This is so pronounced that it makes it completely obvious that loads of Labor slack was being sprayed to Cooper, Peers and James in the pro-Labor booths, with many habitual Labor voters in these booths willing to vote for anyone they had remotely heard of who wasn’t either Liberal or Green.
It is worth looking at how the votes dished out between the six unendorsed candidates by comparing their shares of the total excluding Heatley and Goodwin. On this measure, the best five Bacon booths included the four strong Labor booths, but Crotty’s best booths included some that are traditionally Labor and some that are traditionally Liberal. James performed worst in the traditionally Labor booths but Cooper and Peers seemed to split better by suburb clustering (Cooper in the central south of the electorate and Peers in the central north) than by politics. As a whole, the two “Labor-ish” candidates combined polled between one-third and half of the 2006 state Labor vote by booth, and polled a higher proportion of it in booths that are traditionally strongly Labor. This does not necessarily prove that voters in Labor booths were more inclined to recognise Crotty and Bacon as “Labor candidates” and vote for them on that basis. It may also show that voters in poorer suburbs are more disengaged from local politics and hence less likely to vote for local councillors.
A comparison of the results of Peers and James with their results in 2007 reveals that James lost votes almost everywhere, gaining only marginally in Bligh and losing little in the stronger Labor booths. His biggest losses were in Liberal-leaning booths. Peers broke roughly even (within a point or two) in most booths but made big gains compared to 2007 in strong Labor booths. It seems therefore that Richard James was the Independent of choice for many Liberal voters in 2007 and that Vanessa Goodwin taking nearly all the pro-Lib vote has trashed his vote this time around. Peers, however, attracted Labor voters about as effectively in 2009 as he did Liberal voters in 2007, and because there were so many Labor voters to attract, he was able to improve his vote in a stronger field (a very good result). This is all probably why James has not dominated Peers and Cooper the way he has when they have previously run against him for the Legislative Council.
The result is almost an unequivocally good one for the Liberals. It gives the party something to cheer about at state level after more than a decade of failure, it strengthens Will Hodgman’s leadership and it gives them something to rub Labor’s noses in. It also gives them a new representative who can freshen up the news cycle, instead of just the same seven faces who have now been there since 2002. It does remove a star candidate from the race for Franklin and may create issues in planning her likely transition to the Lower House in future, but the Libs should be able to win a second Franklin seat with any remotely credible and demarcated second candidate. However, there is nothing in the results that proves either way whether Labor’s pain runs deeper than the embarrassment of taking a very big dive in a seat they never needed to lose and the Libs picking up several points worth of the expected by-election backlash. The reason for this is that the two “Labor-ish” candidates ran campaigns so unrepresentative and critical of said party that it is hard to say that they were really “Labor candidates”, whatever Will Hodgman might desire otherwise.
In my view though, this press release by the Premier was an error of judgement. (Yes; another one; errors of judgement by this energetic and otherwise apparently competent Premier are a running theme that Peter Tucker has been particularly strong on). It may have been intended as a nice personal touch or an attempt to sooth over the tensions created by the DEPHA abolition/reconstruction in order to ensure that if Honey Bacon was elected the government would be able to work with her. As it turned out, although it was not a direct endorsement but simply a message of goodwill, it was widely portrayed as an endorsement, and it makes it hard for David Bartlett to escape the fact that he semi-anointed a candidate who only polled 10% of the vote and who failed to run a convincing campaign. Good parliaments are made up of good people? Sure … but to be a good politician you need much more than to just have your heart in the right place, and in this campaign the candidate he singled out for his good wishes did not even convincingly convey the latter.
I will add some comments, most likely in the comments section, after the provisional distribution of preferences.
